Social Action & Science

Being With DyingThis Professional Training Program for Clinicians in Compassionate Care of the Seriously Ill and Dying is fostering a revolution in care of the dying and seriously ill. Clinicians learn essential tools for taking care of dying people with skill and compassion.

ChaplaincyA visionary and comprehensive two-year program for a new kind of chaplaincy to serve individuals, communities, the environment, and the world.

ZEN BRAIN: Consciousness, Complex Systems, and Transformation

Increasingly, cognitive science presents us with a vision of mind as grounded in the complex transformative processes of life; while neuroscience presents us with a vision of the brain as a complex adaptive system that constantly reshapes itself in response to context, experience, and practice.How can this vision of complexity and transformation enrich our understanding of consciousness—the felt experience of awareness across waking, dreaming, sleeping, and dying?

In this intensive program, we explore our lived experience of awareness in relation to our living bodies and brains seen as complex adaptive systems. We focus especially on the themes of “embodied cognition,” “emergent processes,” and “enaction” (cognition as embodied action). Neuroscientists, philosophers, Buddhist scholars, and Zen teachers explore these themes through presentations and discussion interspersed with periods of meditation practice throughout each day.

CEUs FOR COUNSELORS, THERAPISTS, AND SOCIAL WORKERS

17 CEUs for counselors, therapists, and social workers are available for this retreat through the New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Board at a cost of $30. Please indicate that you would like CEUs when you register. You must participate in the full retreat to receive CEUs. CEU recipients will participate in a mandatory group work meeting with Ann-Marie McKelvey at 4pm January 30th.

Please check with your respective State License Board to confirm acceptance of CEUs from the State of New Mexico if you are not in New Mexico.

Ann-Marie McKelvey, LPCC, MCC, Psychotherapist, has completed the two-year Chaplaincy Program at Upaya Zen Center focusing on peacemaking, environmental studies and wellness. Ann-Marie can be reached at http://www.AnnMarieMcKelvey.com.

HOUSING AT UPAYA IS FULL AT THIS TIME. Please contact Roberta at registrar@upaya.org or 505-986-8518 ext. 12 for information on recommended accomodations in town or to be added to the housing wait list.

More about the instructors:

Joan Halifax Roshi is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D in medical anthropology in 1973. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions, including Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, Duke University Medical School, University of Connecticut Medical School, among many others. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, and was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University. From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center on pioneering work with dying cancer patients, using LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy. After the LSD project, she has continued to work with dying people and their families and to teach health care professionals as well as lay individuals on compassionate care of the dying. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying and Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. For the past twenty-five years, she has been active in environmental work. She studied for a decade with Zen Teacher Seung Sahn and was a teacher in the Kwan Um Zen School. She received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was given Inka by Roshi Bernie Glassman. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on applied Buddhism. Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); Shamanic Voices; Shaman: The Wounded Healer; The Fruitful Darkness; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying; and Wisdom Beyond Wisdom (with Kazuaki Tanashashi).

Richard J. Davidson received his Ph.D. in Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychophysiology from Harvard University. He is currently Director for the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience as well as the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research is focused on cortical and subcortical substrates of emotion and affective disorders, including depression and anxiety, using quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to make inferences about patterns of regional brain function. A major focus of his current work is on interactions between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in the regulation of emotion in both normal subjects and patients with affective and anxiety disorders. He has also studied and published several papers on brain physiology in long-term Buddhist meditators, and in persons receiving short-term training in mindfulness meditation. Among his several books is Visions of compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (2002, Oxford University Press), co-edited with Anne Harrington.

Al Kaszniak received his Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Illinois in 1976, and completed an internship in clinical neuropsychology at Rush Medical Center in Chicago. He is currently Director of the Arizona Alzheimer's Consortium Education Core, and a professor in the departments of psychology, neurology, and psychiatry at The University of Arizona (UA. He formerly served as Head of the Psychology Department, and as Director of the UA Center for Consciousness Studies. Al also presently serves as Chief Academic Officer for the Mind and Life Institute, an organization that facilitates collaborative scientific research on contemplative practices and traditions. He is the co-author or editor of seven books, including the three-volume Toward a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press), and Emotions, Qualia, and Consciousness (World Scientific). His research, published in over 150 journal articles and scholarly book chapters, has been supported by grants from the U.S. National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Science Foundation, as well as several private foundations. His work has focused on the neuropsychology of Alzheimer's disease and other age-related neurological disorders, consciousness, memory self-monitoring, emotion, and the psychophysiology of long-term and short-term meditation. Al has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, and has been an advisor to the National Institutes of Health and other governmental agencies. He is a Past-President of the Section on Clinical Geropsychology and fellow of the American Psychological Association and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. In addition to his academic and administrative roles, he is a lineage holder and teacher (Sensei) in the Soto tradition of Zen Buddhism.

Dr. Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In 2014, he was the Invited Numata Visiting Professor at the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015). His other books include Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007) and The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991), co-authored with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch. Dr. Thompson received his B.A. from Amherst College in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Dunne is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he is Co-Director of the Encyclopedia of Contemplative Practices and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He was educated at the Amherst College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of Religion in 1999. Before joining Emory’s faculty in 2005, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and held a research position at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Support from the American Institute of Indian Studies sustained two years of his doctoral research at the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India. His work focuses on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice. In Foundations of Dharmakirti’s Philosophy (2004), he examines the most prominent Buddhist theories of perception, language, inference and justification. His current research includes an inquiry into the notion of “mindfulness” in both classical Buddhist and contemporary contexts, and he is also engaged in a study of Candrakirti’s “Prasannapada”, a major Buddhist philosophical work on the metaphysics of “emptiness” and "selflessness." His recently published work includes an essay on neuroscience and meditation co-authored with Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz. He frequently serves as a translator for Tibetan scholars, and as a consultant, he appears on the roster of several ongoing scientific studies of Buddhist contemplative practices.

My doctoral work focused on mapping neural activation patterns underlying affective processing as well as cognition/emotion interactions associated with individual differences and normative development of self-regulation in childhood. Current research interests include investigating the effects of emotional arousal on the subjective experience of perceptual vividness and its link with memory vividness in healthy young adults and in post-traumatic stress disorder. I am also interested in the influence of emotional state on perceptual processing and higher-order cognitive processes, and the neural mechanisms underlying such influences.

Neil Theise MD is a diagnostic liver pathologist and adult stem cell researcher in New York City, where he is Professor of Pathology and of Medicine at the Beth Israel Medical Center of the Mount Sinai Health System. He is considered a pioneer of multi-organ adult stem cell plasticity and has published on that topic in Science, Nature, and Cell.

Beginning with applications of complexity and emergent self-organization to stem cell behaviors, his work has expanded into include cross-cultural models of biology and medicine, quantum behaviors in biological systems (biological complementarity, uncertainty), and parallels between contemplative insights into reality and contemporary scientific understandings. Most recently, his efforts have focused on the nature of consciousness and the role of sentience to the development and organization of the universe.

His teaching efforts regarding all these themes (text and video, for lay and academic audiences) can be found on his blog, neiltheise.wordpress.com. Additional writings can be found at his website at neiltheise.com.